A History of WordPress Releases

It’s hard to remember a time when WordPress wasn’t a household name that dominated the online world but the first version of WordPress was only received just over a decade ago. How time flies, right?

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little released the earliest version of WordPress in May 2003 and it was originally a project fork of b2/cafelog. Since those days WordPress has gone from strength to strength and its popularity has surged with no signs of slowing down. WordPress powers more than 60 million websites and is easily the most popular CMS around.

So what happened between May 2003 and today to make WordPress such a colossal force on the Web? Well, we decided to have a look at WordPress’ release timeline to find out:

2003

May: WordPress is created as a fork of Michel Valdrighi’s b2/cafelog and version 0.7 is released.

December: Version 3.8 (Parker) is launched, adding in responsive design for mobile devices and a simplified dashboard.

2014

April: Version 3.9 (Smith) brings us live widget previews and a new Theme installer.

September: Just a few short months later we welcome version 4.0 (Benny) with open arms, which improves the content-editing experience, among numerous other enhancements.

December: Well, we’ll just have to wait and see…

What’s interesting, looking back at these, is how ahead of the curve the WordPress developers are with every release. With a new release due in December, we can’t wait to find out what new features will be in store.